Monday, May 4, 2015

In a recent article philosopher Charlie Kurth makes the case
for anxiety. (Via Maggie’s Farm) He argues, persuasively, that anxiety serves a
useful social and moral function. It tells us when we are going wrong and spurs
us to act to make things right.

We do well to allow it to help us through difficult social
situations and moral dilemmas.

We ought not, Kurth argues, to pathologize it and make it
something that can be medicated away. If we disconnect anxiety (and other
emotions) from our lives, making them merely mental static, we withdraw a bit
more from the social world.

Kurth defines anxiety loosely. We know that it is a
subspecies of fear, signaling dangers we might not be aware of. And yet,
anxiety is often seen as a function of guilt: an anticipation of punishment for
having committed a crime or a sin.

In Freudian theory, anxiety is
limited to an anticipation of punishment for having committed a criminal
offense. It belongs to the guilt narrative within which Freud tried to write
human psychology. That narrative begins with a taboo, moves on to a real or
imagined transgression, adds some guilt about the anticipated punishment and
concludes with some form of punishment. For Freud the ultimate punishment was
castration. Thus, anxiety was ultimately castration anxiety.

Kurth sees the issue more broadly and more correctly.

We do not merely feel anxious when we are anticipating
corporal punishment. We might feel anxious when we make the wrong decision, act out of character or create a bad impression. We might also feel anxious when we do not know whether we are doing the right or the wrong thing. In those cases
the emotion does not necessarily involve a crime. It bespeaks the fact that the outcome of your action is uncertain.

If you feel anxious about using the wrong fork or spoon at a
dinner party you are not worried that you will be punished for a crime. You
will be worried that you will be expelled from the conversation.

A fear of ostracism and rejection might well be couched in
anxiety, but the consequence has more to do with social shunning that it does
with corporal punishment.

I see why Kurth describes the feeling as anxiety, but social
anxiety seems more like anguish, a diffuse sense of mental suffering.

Existential philosophers use terms for anguish. Thus, they
distinguish it from anxiety. The German term is angst and the French term is angoisse.
In the French, as in the English, a different word is used for anxiety.

Philosophers and psychologists rarely distinguish between
anxiety and anguish. Kurth uses the term anxiety within the context
of non-criminal social offenses. The dread concerns the fear of being ostracized, not the fear of receiving corporal punishment.

He opens with a dinner table conversation that has gone
awry. You are talking to Sam at dinner. The conversation is proceeding apace,
when, suddenly, Sam withdraws from the conversation and turns his attention
elsewhere. You believe that you must have made a mistake and that you have been
rejected.

Kurth defines this form of anxiety:

Anxiety,
as we ordinarily experience it, is a moderately discomforting response to
uncertain threats or dangers. Your fretfulness at the dinner party, for
instance, is a reaction to your uncertainty about why your conversation with
Sam took a potentially embarrassing turn. You want to make a good impression
and you aren’t sure if you’re succeeding. The result is the unease – the twinge
of worry or concern – that is your anxiety.

Anxiety bespeaks a sense of having failed. It will normally
lead you to try to correct the bad impression you might have made.

Kurth continues:

The
story also tells us something about what anxiety does. It’s an emotion that
gets us to do things, things that can help us to address our predicaments in
distinctive ways. At the dinner, for instance, your anxiety prompts you to try
to get a better understanding of what you might have said that was
inappropriate – hence your replaying of portions of the conversation in your
head. It also induces you to try to make up for any offence you might have
caused, hence your increased deference.

Here Kurth is not describing someone whose has committed a
crime or a sin. He is describing someone who has inadvertently given offense
and is trying to correct the error. And he is not describing someone who is
anticipating a punishment. The rejection has already taken place: Sam has tuned
you out.

Where guilt anticipates a future punishment; shame and its
concomitant social rejection are a present punishment.

In the conversation with Sam, you do not anticipate
rejection. You have already been rejected.

And Kurth describes this anguish—as I would call it-- as a
function of one’s innate sense of shame:

Social
anxiety of the kind we found in the dinner-party conversation with Sam is
concerned with a distinctive kind of uncertainty – namely, are you making a
fool of yourself? As such, it can often lead to such things as deference and
caution: behaviours that can help us to minimise the chance of making a bad
impression. But consider another familiar form of anxiety – what we might call
punishment anxiety: you know you broke the rules, but you don’t know whether
you’ll be thumped for it. Given its source, anxiety of this sort tends to
inspire efforts to make up for what you did by, say, offering a pre-emptive
apology.

Kurth explains that shaming or moral anxiety is a spur to do
the right thing. For those who believe that shaming is always to be avoided, we
emphasize that it is a normal emotion that motivates people to be more sociable and to connect with
other people.

Clearly, Kurth is thinking of anxiety within the context of
a shame culture, not in terms of punishment and penance.

As
we’ve seen, part of anxiety’s power lies in its ability to get us to do things
– things that will help make the anxiety go away. But there are all sorts of
ways to do this. In the face of a morally difficult decision such as what to do
about your mother, you could relieve your anxiety by just popping some Xanax or
trying to dump the decision off on a relative. But to do that would be to just
avoid the source of your anxiety. Appropriately addressing your moral anxiety will
involve such things as … resisting your inclination to just duck the decision
you face.

I'd associate anxiety to "future performance", like giving a speech or running a race, or avoiding being late. You can plan and prepare, but you also need to learn how to self-calm that never-satisified voice of vigilance when you conclude you've done everything you can in relation to the proportional costs of failure.

I actually notice this voice after having some very successful races in April from 5k to 10 miles, while now, after having success, I've lost some of my motive to keep pushing on, keep trying to optimize every little gain and training advantage by the power of my will. So now I have to "turn off" that drive and say its okay to back off for a while and reassess my next goals, and not just assume I have to keep setting higher and higher goals in one small relatively unimportant aspect of my life.

The topic also seems related to a quote from Jung "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."

Suffering is a more subjective word than an emotion like anxiety or anguish. I'm not sure if you substitute those words into Jung's quote if they might mean the same thing. But it makes some sense, that we can learn ways to avoid uncomfortable feelings, and "shoot the messenger" rather than interpret the unwanted message.

M. Scott Peck also talks about this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#Neurotic_and_legitimate_suffering------------Peck believes that it is only through suffering and agonizing using the four aspects of discipline (delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing) that we can resolve the many puzzles and conflicts that we face. This is what he calls undertaking legitimate suffering. Peck argues that by trying to avoid legitimate suffering, people actually ultimately end up suffering more. This extra unnecessary suffering is what Scott Peck terms neurotic suffering. Peck says that our aim must be to eliminate neurotic suffering and to work through our legitimate suffering in order to achieve our individual goals.------------